Word Weaves

Kate DiCamillo is one of my favorite authors. I read Because of Winn Dixie years ago and was enchanted by DiCamillo’s voice. This month I’m reviewing The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.

Edward is an exquisite porcelain rabbit who has everything a toy could ask for: little Abilene who adores him, stunning outfits created especially for him, the entire family’s respect, and a grand house to live in. But Edward takes his life for granted. He doesn’t feel anything for Abilene or her family. Then one day he’s lost at sea and so begins a difficult journey through years of heartache…yes, a porcelain rabbit can feel heartache…and mistreatment. Edward’s reduced to a toy fit for the garbage heap.

In between hardship, Edward’s rescued by an old fisherman, a vagrant, and a starving child. He’s surprised when he begins to care about the people who save him. He sees their suffering and he’s grateful for every morsel of kindness and good fortune. After his face is smashed by a cruel diner owner, a doll maker restores him to a version of his former self. Edward lingers for years in the shop, an unwanted rabbit on the doll shelf. One day a young girl falls in love with his cracked face. The girl is Abilene’s daughter. She returns Edward to the life he once knew, only this time he treasures it.

Below is an excerpt from the book. Edward’s been at the ocean bottom for a long time.

“On the two hundred and ninety-seventh day of Edward’s ordeal, a storm came. The storm was so powerful that it lifted Edward off the ocean floor and led him in a crazy, wild and spinning dance. The water pummeled him and lifted him and shoved him back down.

Help! thought Edward.

The storm, in its ferocity, actually flung him all the way out of the sea; and the rabbit glimpsed, for a moment, the light of an angry and bruised sky; the wind rushed through his ears. It sounded to him like Pellegrina laughing. But before he had time to appreciate being above water, he was tossed back down into the depths. Up and down, back and forth he went until the storm wore itself out, and Edward saw that he was beginning, again, his slow descent to the ocean floor.”

Since I ended last week with the mention of “Feed” and I’m reviewing that book for this month’s Mind Food, I decided to post the column early. The grueling nightly reports on the Gulf oil spill highlight the message in Anderson’s novel: Beware the future.

 In M.T. Anderson’s futuristic society, internet feeds are implanted in the brain. Genetically engineered children are schooled by corporations to become diligent consumers and have very little reason to think for themselves. They live in domed environments, blissfully ignorant of the  decaying world and rising strife. High-schooler, Titus, loves his feed. He muses: “you can be supersmart without ever working,” and “the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that makes it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are.”  

Titus and his wealthy friends meet a girl named Violet (who is home-schooled and poor) while visiting the moon on spring break. Their feeds are hacked by an extremist at a nightclub, and they are hospitalized so their feeds can be cleansed by technicians. Violet learns her feed, an inferior model,  is permanently impaired. She keeps this news to herself and the teens return home.

Titus is attracted to Violet’s unique perspective. She actually thinks for herself and fights the feed’s attempt to analyze her consuming habits. He continues seeing Violet, despite his family and friends’s negative reaction to the non conformist. When Violet’s body starts shutting down as a result of the hacking, Titus is faced with ugly truths about a humanity controlled by corporate computers.

Great science fiction can shape the future by sparking the imaginations of budding minds. I hope in the case of Feed, the book will serve as a warning.

Creepy passages:

“It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them.”

and

“We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds (TM) were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset…”

This month I’m reviewing two-time Newbery winner E. L. Konigsburg’s    “The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World.”  Three things I liked about this book right away: a Florida setting, art, and estate sales. Add to that quirky characters, mystery, and a lively plot, and you have a book that keeps you up at night.

New kid in town, six-grader, Amadeo Kaplan, is an only child and used to hanging out with adults. His eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Zender, a retired opera singer, hires Amadeo’s classmate, William Wilcox and his mother to prepare her belongings for an estate sale. Amadeo befriends William and offers to help with the sale. His secret passion is to find something no one else has found and Mrs. Zender’s colorful mansion seems the perfect place to do that.

What Amadeo discovers unlocks a painful secret linking a Modigliani sketch to the horrors of Nazi Germany. Beyond that, he finds friendship and compassion for those affected by a tragic past.  I love a book that teaches me something  new within a well-written story.  Konigsburg enlightened me about Hitler’s “Degenerate” art campaign to erradicate modern art and she personalized the labeling and tagging of people Hitler considered degnerate.

Two of my favorite passages from the book are:

“What chance was there of discovering something in a state that has in its geographic center a Disney-designated Discovery Island that is itself in the middle of a designated Adventureland with a ticket booth at its entrance and a gift shop at its exit?”

and

“The Nazis love having records more than they hate homosexuals, and the Nazis don’t make razzias of homosexuals as they do the Jews and the Gypsies. Homosexuals are less of a problem because we do not reproduce.”

*Razzia is a term for plundering raids.

For two years, I’ve read nothing but children’s books.  I often find gems I wish to  share with the world. So, today starts a new feature on this blog. Each month, I’ll review a favorite read.

The Fire-us Trilogy by Jennifer Armstrong and Nancy Butcher is a YA post-apocalyptic tale set in Florida. It follows seven children who formed a family four years after a plague killed all the adults.  Mommy, Hunter, Teacher, Action Figure, Teddy Bear, Baby, and Doll live in a mildewed subdivision house with no electricity. Hunter, the oldest boy, scavenges for supplies in the daytime. He’s cleaned out the food in nearby houses and there’s little stock left in local stores. As he travels, he removes skeletons so the rest of his family won’t have to see them. Fourteen-year-old, Mommy, does her best to nurture the family and Teacher guides them with the help of The Book, an album she’s pieced together with scraps from magazines, newspapers, and phone books.

The children are facing starvation when a new boy knocks on their door. Angerman talks through a wood frame with the voice of a TV anchor. He makes the older kids nervous  while the little ones giggle and flock to his side. Angerman convinces the children to set out for Washington in search of the President who will surely have answers to their questions about the plague…Fire-us. Their journey challenges their courage, resilience, and ingenuity.

Armstrong and Butcher lured me into their imaginative world with alligators lurking in overgrown lawns and an evolving society based on children’s fractured post-traumatic memories. The story is told from multiple point of views which can be confusing, but in this case works. Tension builds from the first book to the second, leading to a surprise ending in the third.